What's Wrong With This Picture? A lack of diversity is harming the National Minority tournament

When I was the seventh-or eighth-ranked player at Florida A&M in the mid-1990s, many of the historically black colleges we competed against were just beginning to recruit their first white players, from the U.S. and abroad. For those of us who grew up supporting black colleges, it was an ominous sign of things to come. In recent years white players representing black schools have become the rule, not the exception, and last week I attended the 17th annual National Minority College Golf Championship to see how much the face of minority golf has changed. The tournament, held under the paternalistic watch of the PGA of America at its PGA Golf Club in Port St. Lucie, Fla., turned out to be a showcase of the best nonblacks from 14 historically black colleges, plus predominantly Hispanic Texas-Pan American and Johnson & Wales, a culinary-arts and business university with five campuses nationwide, including a North Miami branch that school officials repeatedly pointed out is 70% black and Hispanic.

Bethune-Cookman, of Daytona Beach, won the Division I title with four white players--two Canadians, an Australian, an Englishman--and a native of Calcutta. Johnson & Wales took the Division II crown with four white Americans and an Argentine. Indeed, only five of the 30 players on the top six teams in the field could be classified as minorities.

All of this would surely have been dispiriting to the late Dr. Herschel Cochrane, the former president of the National Negro Golf Association who conceived the tournament in 1986 to encourage the participation of black golfers at historically black colleges. The PGA took over cosponsorship of the event in 1998, and ever since, the mission has become sanitized and less specific--and ultimately less effective. Minority is now used as camouflage for a strategic ambiguity about race. Any college with a student body made up predominantly of minorities (currently or historically) is eligible to compete in the championship, but its golf team can be as lily-white as the '80's-era Shoal Creek Golf Club. Some may consider this an appealing sort of reverse affirmative action, but college golf already has the NCAAs to identify the best players and teams. The National Minority College Championship was founded to foster camaraderie and competition among black players at historically black schools, but that unique atmosphere has become a casualty of today's win-at-all-costs mentality.

I once played in a match against an upper-middle-class white Toronto native who told me he didn't know he was going to be attending a black college until the day he arrived at school. The kids can't be blamed for accepting scholarships; they simply want somewhere to play. It is up to the coaches and alumni to recruit black student-athletes and to restore the meaning of the tournament. At this year's awards dinner PGA boss Jim Awtrey called the National Minority one of his organization's major championships. To me, that mentality is a big part of the problem, but apparently I'm in the minority.